Sahara is a stunning piece of work — stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every way imaginable. How this didn’t go direct to video or cable or airplane or bootleg is unfathomable. Actually, that’s not entirely true. It gets a proper blockbuster theatrical release through Paramount Pictures because its…
When was the last time you walked out of a theater feeling shell-shocked, saying to anyone who would listen (in language more profane): “Dude, that was some seriously messed-up stuff!” Not your garden-variety messed-up stuff, mind you, like in Saw. Not the messed-up revelations of political docs. We’re talking the…
Last year, the Simmons family of Needham, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, sent Christmas cards for the first time in more than twenty years. “We send out Xmas cards about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series,” the card very cleverly proclaimed. This movie is for them. In…
Filmmaker Rick Ray spent four months in India, where one-sixth of the earth’s people live, shooting his wide-ranging documentary, The Soul of India. Ray will introduce and discuss the new film in Boulder this week as part of the Macky Travel Film Series at the University of Colorado. Along with…
Some believe that Cuba is the birthplace of salsa dance and music, but neither is exclusively Cuban. Instead, most agree that the style is really a combination of many Latin and Afro-Caribbean dances and rhythms. As for the actual term, Salsa Central Denver founder Malina Farias credits the great Tito…
Thursday, April 7 A treasury of films both new and old from the Spanish-speaking world will be offered up to the public over the next four days during El Centro Su Teatro’s Xicanindie FilmFest 7, a well-rounded international showcase that just keeps getting better every year. Fest spokesman and local…
Local playwright Melissa Lucero McCarl, fresh off the lauded run of her dramatic Frida Kahlo tribute, Painted Bread, says the creation of her next great project, a play about expatriate author Gertrude Stein, resulted from a “serendipitous chain of events.” The chance to show off the complexities of the legendary…
SAT, 4/9 What’s worse than a cheap cigar? A cheap dildo. Thankfully, you won’t find any of those at Hysteria, a new “feminist, progressive, sex-positive boutique” that opens at 11 a.m. today at 114 South Broadway. Wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Hauptman and Pete Yribia modeled their shop after the internationally known…
SAT, 4/9 The initial run of the Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway could have been monumentally disastrous. Utilizing a “cog” or “rack” railway system that was relatively new at the time — outside of a few steep tracks in Switzerland, there were not many such railways in existence — designers…
FRI, 4/8 Japanese painter Yumiko Kayukawa has earned a global reputation for fusing balance, harmony and…’ 80s butt rock. Inspired by a deep childhood connection with nature and her passion for bands like Cheap Trick and Motley Crüe, Kayukawa mixes lotus blossoms, kanji (Japanese calligraphy), quirky animals and a post-punk…
SUN, 4/10 Not even the best mix CD can compare with the musical diversity of singer and actress Sheryl Renee. A sample of her repertoire, which covers over 120 artists, will be on display tonight during Sheryl Renee and Her Salute to the Legends. Every Sunday this month, Renee will…
The landscape and the natural environment have long preoccupied artists. In a contemporary context, though, artists can’t simply record the scenery; they need to comment on it, transform it. Robischon Gallery is currently presenting a pair of solos featuring two Boulder artists whose reputations go way beyond the metro area…
Two contemporary abstraction artists, McKay Otto and Ethan Jantzer, have been given separate solos at + Gallery (2350 Lawrence Street, 303-296-0927). The two shows, Otto’s Every Place and Jantzer’s Bound, are very compatible, with both artists doing new work based on time-tested traditions in abstract art: expressionism and minimalism. Otto,…
Balance. Rarely has Walker Fine Art come up with an exhibit as successful as Balance, which pairs recent abstract paintings by Denver artist Don Quade with abstract sculptures by Colorado Springs-based Bill Burgess. Quade was formerly at Fresh Art Gallery, but Walker picked him up when Fresh Art closed last…
Paris on the Platte is a comic romp through early-nineteenth-century Denver history, focusing on Mayor Robert Speer and his dreams of “The City Beautiful.” The opening — a spoof on old-time melodrama — doesn’t quite work: It’s hard to tell exactly what’s being said by the yelling, gesticulating actors. But…
Polonio Castro, the protagonist of Thaddeus Phillips’s El Conquistador!, is a Colombian peasant living out a fantasy. Although there are similar Everyman characters in many cultures, Polonio reminds me of the humorous little men who populate Czech film and literature — not too great a stretch, given that Phillips’s theater…
Cats. This company does as good a job with Cats as one can imagine. The dancing, choreographed by Stephen Bertles, who also directed, is seamless. The cast is lithe and graceful. They slither like snakes. They leap high and land without a sound. They’re wonderfully into character, batting at each…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American Dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most discomfiting…
If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a ten-year period, as storyboards for the movie,…
Does the world really need a new film from Woody Allen every single year? Yes, he is one of America’s great auteurs. Yes, he’s responsible for some very fine movies, many of them comedies (Annie Hall), several of them tragedies (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Another Woman), and some hovering in that…
A spinoff of a sequel, Beauty Shop plays like most Hollywood comedies these days: as tepid sitcom, benign product and cynical afterthought. If last year’s Barbershop 2: Back in Business was little more than a dilapidated retread of 2002’s charmingly lightweight hit Barbershop, consider this incarnation condemned for teardown. It’s…
“This show is political,” Margaret Cho says of her new comedy act, Assassin, which she performs at the Buell Theatre on Thursday, March 31. “Politics are inescapable. It’s really a broad thing, and it’s frustrating to me. It’s due to a conservative atmosphere — not only with the Bush administration,…
